During the past five years, web portals, which provide access to a variety of applications and content through a single location, have become increasingly popular. One ongoing need has been the ability for providers of web applications to utilize a wide range of applications without having to set up an elaborate support framework for the applications.
The Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard by the OASIS group has enabled the delivery of functional applications from producer sites to consumer sites. However, the implementation of WSRP has presented considerable difficulties. Additionally, as web portals become more complex there has been a need to coordinate activity among the different elements of the web portal. Particularly, individual portlets can often be affected by the behavior of the larger portal framework or other portlets.
However, there is no robust mechanism for notifying remote portlets of events occurring within the larger portal framework. What is needed is an improved mechanism for inter-portlet communication in a web services environment.